Biography

Zygmunt Bauman was born to non-practising Polish-Jewish parents in Poznań, Poland, in 1925. When Poland was invaded by the Nazis in 1939 his family escaped eastwards into the Soviet Union. Bauman then enlisted in the Soviet-controlled Polish First Army, working as a political education instructor. He took part in the battles of Kolberg (now Kołobrzeg) and Berlin. In May 1945 he was awarded the Military Cross of Valour.

Further Bauman worked as an informer for the Military Intelligence from 1945 to 1948. However, the nature and extent of his collaboration remain unknown, as well as the exact circumstances under which it was terminated.[2]

In an interview in The Guardian, Bauman confirmed that he had been a committed communist during and after World War II and had never made a secret of it. He admitted, however, that joining the military intelligence service at age 19 was a mistake even though he had a "dull" desk-job and did not remember informing on anyone.[3]

In the KBW, Bauman had risen to the rank of major when he was suddenly dishonourably discharged in 1953, after his father approached the Israeli embassy in Warsaw with a view to emigrating to Israel. As Bauman did not share his father's Zionist tendencies and was indeed strongly anti-Zionist, his dismissal caused a severe, though temporary estrangement from his father. During the period of unemployment that followed, he completed his M.A. and in 1954 became a lecturer at the University of Warsaw, where he remained until 1968.

Bauman went on to publish other books, including Socjologia na co dzień ("Sociology for everyday life", 1964), which reached a large popular audience in Poland and later formed the foundation for the English-language text-book Thinking Sociologically (1990).

Initially, Bauman remained close to orthodox Marxist doctrine, but influenced by Antonio Gramsci and Georg Simmel, he became increasingly critical of Poland's communist government.[citation needed] Because of this he was never awarded a professorship even after he completed his habilitation but, after his former teacher Julian Hochfeld was made vice-director of UNESCO's Department for Social Sciences in Paris in 1962, Bauman de facto inherited Hochfeld's chair.

In a 2011 interview in the important Polish weekly "Polityka" Bauman criticized Zionism and Israel, saying Israel was not interested in peace and that it was "taking advantage of the Holocaust to legitimize unconscionable acts." He compared the Israeli West Bank barrier to the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto where hundreds of thousands of Jews died in the Holocaust. Israeli ambassador to Warsaw, Zvi Bar, called Bauman's comments "half truths" and "groundless generalizations."[4]

Early work

Bauman's earliest publication in English is a study of the British labour movement and its relationship to class and social stratification, originally published in Poland in 1960.[7] He continued to publish on the subject of class and social conflict until the early 1980s, with his last book on the subject being Memories of Class.[8] Whilst his later books do not address issues of class directly, he continues to describe himself as a socialist, and he has never rejected Marxism entirely [9] The Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci in particular remains one of his most profound influences.

Modernity and rationality

In the late 1980s and early 1990s Bauman published a number of books that dealt with the relationship between modernity, bureaucracy, rationality and social exclusion.[10] Bauman, following Freud, came to view European modernity as a trade off; European society, he argued, had agreed to forego a level of freedom in order to receive the benefits of increased individual security. Bauman argued that modernity, in what he later came to term its 'solid' form, involved removing unknowns and uncertainties; it involved control over nature, hierarchical bureaucracy, rules and regulations, control and categorisation — all of which attempted to gradually remove personal insecurities, making the chaotic aspects of human life appear well-ordered and familiar.

Then, over a number of books Bauman began to develop the position that such order-making efforts never manage to achieve the desired results. When life becomes organised into familiar and manageable categories, he argued, there are always social groups who cannot be administered, who cannot be separated out and controlled. In his book Modernity and Ambivalence Bauman began to theorise such indeterminate persons by introducing the allegorical figure of 'the stranger.' Drawing upon the sociology of Georg Simmel and the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, Bauman came to write of the stranger as the person who is present yet unfamiliar, society's undecidable.

In Modernity and Ambivalence Bauman attempted to give an account of the different approaches modern society adopts toward the stranger. He argued that, on the one hand, in a consumer-oriented economy the strange and the unfamiliar is always enticing; in different styles of food, different fashions and in tourism it is possible to experience the allure of what is unfamiliar. Yet this strange-ness also has a more negative side. The stranger, because he cannot be controlled and ordered, is always the object of fear; he is the potential mugger, the person outside of society's borders who is constantly threatening.

Bauman's most famous book, Modernity and the Holocaust, is an attempt to give a full account of the dangers of these kinds of fears. Drawing upon Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno's books on totalitarianism and the Enlightenment, Bauman developed the argument that the Holocaust should not simply be considered to be an event in Jewish history, nor a regression to pre-modern barbarism. Rather, he argued, the Holocaust should be seen as deeply connected to modernity and its order-making efforts. Procedural rationality, the division of labour into smaller and smaller tasks, the taxonomic categorisation of different species, and the tendency to view rule-following as morally good all played their role in the Holocaust coming to pass. And he argued that for this reason modern societies have not fully taken on board the lessons of the Holocaust; it is generally viewed—to use Bauman's metaphor—like a picture hanging on a wall, offering few lessons.

In Bauman's analysis the Jews became 'strangers' par excellence in Europe;[11] the Final Solution was pictured by him as an extreme example of the attempts made by societies to excise the uncomfortable and indeterminate elements existing within them. Bauman, like the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, contended that the same processes of exclusion that were at work in the Holocaust could, and to an extent do, still come into play today.

Postmodernity and consumerism

In the mid-to-late 1990s, Bauman began exploring postmodernity and consumerism.[12] He posited that a shift had taken place in modern society in the latter half of the 20th century; it had changed from a society of producers into a society of consumers. According to Bauman, this change reversed Freud's "modern" tradeoff—i.e., security was given up in order to enjoy more freedom, freedom to purchase, consume, and enjoy life. In his books in the 1990s Bauman wrote of this shift as being a shift from "modernity" to "post-modernity". Since the turn of the millennium, his books have tried to avoid the confusion surrounding the term "postmodernity" by using the metaphors of "liquid" and "solid" modernity. In his books on modern consumerism Bauman still writes of the same uncertainties that he portrayed in his writings on "solid" modernity; but in these books he writes of these fears being more diffuse and harder to pin down. Indeed, they are, to use the title of one of his books, "liquid fears"—i.e., fears about pedophilia, for instance, which are amorphous and have no easily identifiable referent.[13]

The University of Leeds launched The Bauman Institute within its School of Sociology and Social Policy in Bauman's honour in September 2010.[15]

The "University of Lower Silesia", a small for-profit higher education institution in Lower Silesia, Poland, planned to award Bauman an honorary doctorate in October 2013.[16] However, as a reaction to a major anti-communist and what Bauman supporters allege "anti-semitic" uproar against him, he eventually rejected the award.[17][18]

Criticisms

In 2014, Peter Walsh, a PhD candidate from University of Cambridge, UK accused Bauman of plagiarizing from several websites including Wikipedia in his book titled Does the Richness of the Few Benefit Us All? (2013). In his book Bauman copied verbatim paragraphs from Wikipedia articles on slow food and steady state economy, along with their bibliography, without attributing source, authors or the fact that they were copied from the Wikipedia. He also copied a paragraph from article on golden handshake, but this citation was properly attributed to Wikipedia.[19]

In a response Bauman suggested that "obedience" to "technical" rules was unnecessary, and that he "never once failed to acknowledge the authorship of the ideas or concepts that I deployed, or that inspired the ones I coined".[20] A detailed critique of Walsh and David Lehmann by Brad Evans and Henry A. Giroux notes: "This charge against Bauman is truly despicable. It's a reactionary ideological critique dressed up as the celebration of method and a back-door defense of a sterile empiricism and culture of positivism. This is a discourse that enshrines data, correlations, and performance, while eschewing matters of substance, social problems, and power." [21]